Category: Platformer

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Game Ramblings #57 – Super Mario Odyssey

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: 3D Platformer
  • Platform: Switch

TL;DR

  • Another great entry in the Super Mario series, with great platforming mechanics, a predictable but fun story, and great world locations to explore
  • Collectathon-style worlds didn’t work as well for me as the more focused Mario 64/Sunshine style individual stars, but the story moons in particular were great
  • New core mechanic of taking over enemies and using their abilities was a great focus for the design, and works fantastically
  • Theme song of the year – go buy it on iTunes or Google Play Music

I’ll be perfectly honest from the start here; I still think Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine are better games.  While Super Mario Odyssey is definitely a fantastic game on its own, the change to the star collecting mechanic into something more akin to Banjo-Kazooie often felt weird to me with a strange mix of really good focused moons alongside completely incidental ones that you can find in things like piles of leaves.  That said, once I get beyond that change the rest of the game was fantastic and is as good as any Mario game we’ve seen before.

Flick a hat at an enemy and more often than not you take them over, gaining their abilities and strengths.

Since it is the core difference in the game, let’s start with the takeover.  For various story reasons, your hat is now alive and can bind Mario to the soul of his enemies, or something to that effect.  The end result is that you can now become your enemy.  Take over a Goomba, and you can now build stacks of goombas and stop sliding around on ice.  Take over a Cheep Cheep and you can now swim under water without needing to breathe.  Hell, take over a T-Rex and stomp the shit out of everything around you just for laughs.  This even extends to seemingly mundane things like the little traffic cones in the city that you can use to catapult Mario around.

This new core ability and the set of enemy mechanics that come out of it are used to great effect.  A large portion of the boss fights use specific environment and enemy combos to change things from just being your standard 3 butt stomp affairs.  Almost any puzzle solving segment will involve finding the nearby enemy type to use their skill set.  Even just for changing up gameplay a bit, it’s nice to be able to warp into an enemy and use a completely different set of skills than Mario on his own can do.  There’s even a surprise at the end that leads to one of the most bombastic finishes to a Mario game that I can remember.

While most bosses are typical scale for a Mario experience, that wasn’t always the case.

On the boss front, there really was a much wider variety than normal.  There’s a recurring set of bosses that act as this game’s substitute for the Koopa kids, and they’re the normal 3 hit to kill with minor mechanical changes.  However, there’s definitely a few much larger bosses in place.  For example, the New Donk City segment has a large centipede boss that can warp in and out of buildings, and the only way to defeat it is to hat-possess a tank and shoot its weak points.  A later fight pictured above has a very non-Mario dragon boss that ends up being more about attack avoidance than offense, with distinct cooldown segments where Mario can land his damage.

The end result of all this is that both by sheer quantity, as well as mechanic variety, this is the widest set of boss fights that Mario has ever seen, and the game’s pacing greatly benefited from it.  At a typical rate, I was seeing a boss every 30-45 minutes, giving me a nice set of pseudo-open world collecting, followed by a high intensity battle.  The consistency of this pace and the mechanical variety allowed for the game to pump up the action when needed to avoid the slow pace trap that other heavy collection platformers have fallen to.

Little touches like the 2D segments gave a lot of life to the world, and some fun hints at the past.

However, it was that collection aspect that ended up being the strong low point for me in an otherwise fantastic game.  The amount of collection just didn’t make sense, and often times felt like fluff to me.  In a typical world, you’d have 3-5 moons that were mandatory per-story, then the need to collect an additional 15-20 just to power up the ship and leave for the next kingdom.  Out of those, I’d estimate about half were purely incidental; a glowing stump may be a hint at a hidden moon, a music note starts a 10 second run to collect all notes, or hell, just a moon floating out in the open that you have to climb a tree to collect.  Among the ones that required a bit more effort, you’d typically see a segment similar to a simplified hidden shines in Super Mario Sunshine, where some quick platforming or single-mechanic enemy would grab you a guaranteed obvious shine and loosely hidden shine.  While there were certainly a lot of shines to get, it often didn’t really feel like there was much point to a lot of them, and I’d have rather seen a larger focus on expanding the story or hidden-area shines into something more meaningful.

There’s definitely a few other minor things there that didn’t really hit.  The motion controls in particular are pretty terrible, but purely optional.  On the hardware front, I’d recommend playing with a Pro Controller over the Joycons, as I had far too many deaths caused by the signal loss that is effecting them.  Some weird mechanical bugs, such as an unintended quick pivot when using fire flower boosts also killed me too many times in some tight movement areas.  However, they’re not really the types of things that kill enjoyment of the game, at least beyond some grumbling at the time problems came up.

What kind of Mario game would it be without Bowser’s Castle? It’s seen some upgrades this go around.

That said, while the collectathon may prevent me from ever doing a 100% run, it certainly didn’t stop me from really enjoying the hell out of what I did play.  End of the day, the core mechanics of the game are just too good to miss out on.  The platforming is as fun as it’s ever been and for the moons that push for depth, it’s more important than ever to be on top of my game.  Even just the act of running around the worlds to get to the next objective is fun to do due to the much larger inclusion of vertical elements and enemies to takeover to traverse them.  While it may not hold up to me like 64 or Sunshine, this is still a game worth getting a console for, and that right there says a lot about the quality that’s in place.

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Game Ramblings #56 – A Hat in Time

More info from Gears for Breakfast

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PC
  • Also Available On: MacOS, PS4, Xbox One

TL;DR

  • Great riff on the Super Mario Sunshine game loop with some clever mechanics to avoid feeling too samey
  • Solid core platforming mechanics held back a bit by some auto activated actions

Back in the Yooka-Laylee write up I wrote “I’ve seen a lot of people saying that this game proves that 3D platformers are dead, but I’m not convinced.”  A Hat in Time is proof of that.  While it’s far from a perfect game, it picked a great game to start with and moved in its own direction to give us a classically-inspired platformer that doesn’t fall prey to the nostalgia trap that others have.

The nods at Mario games aren’t hidden, even down to the last dungeon being a take on Bowser’s Castle.

It’s obvious right from the start that the team behind the game loved Super Mario Sunshine.  The core game loop is 100% there.  Each world has some common theme with a bunch of different missions, replacing shine collection with a time piece.  After finishing a bunch of the individual segments, you get a spectacular boss fight, then on to the next world.  Secret levels are scattered throughout to test your platforming skills and give more time pieces as you earn different abilities.  Rather than FLUDD, you get a bunch of hats and badges as helpers, but the helper effect in puzzle solving and combat is similar.  It’d be easy knock the game for being so close, but once you get past the basics the game starts bringing in some unique pieces to make the game feel unique on its own.

Each world has its own theme, whether it be the mafia-filled restaurant island or a haunted forest where you lose your soul.  More importantly though, each world plays different.  As an example, one world involves the travels through an active movie studio.  Rather than going with the open level pattern that Sunshine uses, you instead go through parallel movie sets actively helping in film some movies.  Another instance has a true open-world taking place in a set of sky islands, where you never drop out of the world after collecting a time piece.  In doing this, the gameplay feels familiar, but the actual pace of world completion changes enough to feel fresh throughout.

Boss fights are always colorful, always entertaining, and as usual a music theme only helps.

The breadth of powers available in hats and badges also opens up the gameplay a lot more than the Mario source.  In the badge department, some of these purely exist as helpers, whether it’s a collection magnet or a radar to find treasures in the world.  Some of them add practical moves, like a hookshot or the ability to quick-charge hat powers.  Still others are just there for fun, like the one that replaces voiceovers with mumbling.  Hats are more direct in their use, allowing for things like slowing time or creating platforms out of specially marked areas.  The important thing is that you’re limited in what can be equipped at a time to one hat and eventually up to three badges.  This lends an important strategic element as swapping out your gear in the middle of a fight can be a big hazard, so the planning element of figuring out what gear you want can be the difference between life and death.

That’s not to say that this game entirely avoided all the common pitfalls of 3D platformers.  When the camera is free to move, there’s still a lot of areas where the camera either gets in your way, or the need to move it causes havoc in tight platforming areas.  There’s also a number of auto-activated moves that like to cause chaos.  The wall run in particular had a habit of activating when I was just trying to platform near a wall, often causing me to catch over a gap and fall to my death.  Generally speaking though things worked as well as I expect out of the genre, and problems I had were minimal enough to not cause me to want to shelve the game out of lack of patience.

There’s also a bunch of secret levels which unsurprisingly take the form of similar levels out of Sunshine.

If there’s anything I’d really say here as a wrap up note, it’s that nostalgia-based platformers probably want to be careful of where they pull their source.  Yooka-Laylee took inspiration from slower Banjo-Kazooie collectathons and joke-focused writing, much to its detriment.  In going with something like Super Mario Sunshine, A Hat in Time was able to take a game loop that is much more immediately satisfying to the user, and write a light, but still solid story that didn’t need to lean on in-jokes to try to get laughs out of the audience.  By then adding its own spins to both the move set and world flow, it was able to do something unique to itself to avoid feeling like a carbon copy of the original.  With Super Mario Odyssey just a few days away, I’m pretty confident that we’ve yet to see the end of this genre.

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Game Ramblings #47 – Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap

More Information from DotEmu

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Switch, Xbox One, Windows, Linux, Mac
  • Original Version On: Sega Master System, Game Gear, TurboGrafx-16

Right from the start I could see that this game is a lovingly made remake of Wonder Boy III.  This remake feels like the original, if the original was made in 2017 with fantastically drawn visuals.  While that means that it doesn’t lose its original charm, it also means that it carries some finicky mechanics from the late 80s with it.  However, the quality of the original still comes through, and being able to play it without having to break out the old consoles is still worth the experience, and the polish in place to transition between the old and new is absolutely impressive.

The hand drawn style is a standout, particularly against the original primitive pixel visuals.

The most obvious thing that’s been changed here are the visuals.  Rather than going the easy route and sticking with an upgraded 8-bit Master System style, DotEmu went all out with a full visual refresh of the original game.  Every character, NPC, and world area has been redrawn over the original geometry, maintaining the original gameplay space, but giving it a fantastically modern look.  If it wasn’t for Cuphead finally being ready to release, this one would probably be a runaway winner for me in terms of flat out best looking pure 2D platformer.

Transition between styles is immediate, and can be done at any time.

However, the more impressive trick is that you can go between the original and modern looks at any time, and most importantly, the original sprites maintain the aspect ratio of the remake on modern platforms, giving a nice mix between the look of the old and the practical functionality between the two.  You simply press R2, the screen wipes side to side, and you’re right in the old style without having to pause the game.  This can also be done with R3, changing the music between the old and new, giving you the option to mix and match your preferred styles for sound and visuals at any time.  This is particularly important, because it has some surprising gameplay ramifications as well.

The hit boxes in modern graphics are…vague.

One of the biggest issues I continued to have was that the hit boxes in modern style were not that precise to the actual visuals of the character.  In some cases they matched pretty well to the general shape of the enemies, but in a lot of cases they were often much smaller than I was expecting.  For single enemies this wasn’t a huge deal, but for packs of enemies, it meant I was often swinging and missing, then getting stuck in situations where I would take a lot of unnecessary damage.  However, the hit boxes in the original game were generally much more precise, so by the tail end of the game, I was often switching to the old visuals purely for collision convenience, and minimizing my damage taken simply due to the more instinct-precise way of attacking.

Mechanically speaking, there’s also a few warts that were fine in the 80s, but at this point are kind of just moderate annoyances.  There’s a lot of situations where enemies can stun lock you into corners and walls.  While I wouldn’t take damage after a hit until I finally landed, it was annoying getting endlessly juggled into a corner until an enemy decided to finally turn around and back off.  For the bosses, they were mostly fairly trivial as well, with each boss generally having one attack and a single hit zone that was generally placed in the most obnoxious place to attack, while trying to avoid relatively quick and low damage attacks.  Jump physics are generally fairly precise, but mid-air control is definitely not as good as some more modern takes on the genre like Shovel Knight.  Generally speaking, this was a pretty high quality game mechanically when it originally came out, and the remake benefits from being able to start with that solid base.  While everything here is still pretty solid, it definitely plays like an 80s game, for better or worse.

All that said, this is a great take on an older title.  In doing the port, they avoided the trap that a lot of remakes do in trying to reimagine an old title.  This one is as straight a gameplay port as I’ve ever seen, particularly since the old title runs permanently emulated in the background.  The modern visuals and audio, as well as the fantastic feature to switch to the originals in real time is a nice touch that I wish more remakes would take advantage of.  End of the day, if it comes down to breaking out an old console, or playing this remake on a modern platform, I’d say throw out the few bucks and go this way, it’s worth it just for the visuals.